Cover

Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Contents

Acknowledgments

I have accumulated a great many debts in researching and writing this book
about transatlantic black migration across the late eighteenth-century British
empire. They are debts I can never discharge, but it is a great pleasure to
have the opportunity to acknowledge a few of them here.
I first seriously grappled with the questions and concerns at the heart
of this book as a history graduate student at Duke University. In Durham,
Janet Ewald, the late John Cell...

Introduction: Black Migrations

On an overcast afternoon in the wet season of 1787, three trading ships
working in the Sierra Leone River were interrupted in their business by
the approach of a lone British war sloop and a leash of creaking transports,
the sloop firing cannon to announce its arrival. The traders already in the
estuary—some, no doubt, Guineamen awaiting their human cargos—had
just been joined by a...

Part I. Captives

By the 1740s, merchants and slave traders along the Biafran
littoral and their connections in the interior succeeded in
consolidating long-existing trade networks while aggressively
forging new ones. In the resulting commercial transformation,
the trading men and women of Bonny and Elem
Kalabari (also known as New Calabar) in the eastern Niger Delta and Old
Calabar in the Cross River began...

1. The Slave Trade from the Biafran Interior: Violence, Serial Displacement, and the Rudiments of Igbo Society

Who were they and where did they come from, the thousands of slaves
who perished, passed through, or were integrated into the social fabric of
Old Calabar, Bonny, and Elem Kalabari? Coming to terms with these two
fundamental questions focuses attention on the matter of how enslaved migrants
from the emigrant heart of the British empire were affected by their
journeys. Contemporaries...

2. The Slave Ship and the Beginnings of Igbo Society in the African Diaspora

What did it mean to be an Igbo man or woman in the eighteenth-century
Atlantic world? Was it a shared language? A spate of common beliefs and
practices? A way of viewing the world? Scholars who have addressed Igbo
society and culture in the African diaspora have tended to answer such
questions affirmatively. Viewing Igbo society in these ways recognizes
what Igbo ultimately came...

3. White Power and the Context of Slave Seasoning in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

In the late eighteenth century, British slave ships loaded more captives
from along the Bight of Biafra (mostly at New Calabar, Bonny, and Old
Calabar, really) than from slave ports in any other region of western Africa.
Across the Atlantic, the island of Jamaica was the Bight of Biafra’s
American analogue. In the late eighteenth century, British ships carried
more women, men,...

4. Routines of Disaster and Revolution

The stage on which freshly arrived Africans worked out new lives in Jamaica
was formed in large measure by the whims and desires of a small number of
white planters and their managers. Moreover, in the late eighteenth century
the context and rhythm of slave seasoning was further shaped by peculiar
environmental circumstances. In the years surrounding the American war
a handful of storms...

Part II. Voyagers

Five days after the commissary—a man called Gustavus
Vassa—handed in the last of the embarkation lists, the Atlantic,
the Belisarius, and the Vernon got under way. The small convoy
was charged with ferrying some four hundred black Londoners,
Vassa among...

FIVE: Social Movement and Imagining Freedom in the British Capital

Why did hundreds of blacks depart London to hack out a British colony
in Sierra Leone? An item in the Public Advertiser during the first month of
1786 starts toward an answer. The notice in question asked the city’s wellheeled
merchants and gentry to focus their attention on the plight of “Asiatic
Blacks”—i.e., South Asian sailors—who, dismissed from their ships,
were stranded in London with little or no means of support. The missive
encouraged the formation...

SIX: Migration and the Impossible Demands of Leaving London

By the fall of 1786, potential emigrants and their Samaritans had come to
terms. Eight months of plans, proposals, and counters were slowly turning
into something of actual substance. Before this time, black Londoners were
obliged only to decide whether they agreed with the proposals before them.
Now, they faced the harder question of whether they would put their lives
behind what they had...

SEVEN: From Slaves to Free Subjects in British North America

The men and women who comprised the mass migration from the Maritimes
mustered an ironic inf luence over the reorienting tendencies of
transatlantic migration. Whereas the transatlantic social experiences of
captives from the Biafran interior and of black adventurers from London
can both be largely comprehended as communities made in crossing, the
migration from Nova...

EIGHT: Black Society and the Limits of British Freedom

Loyalist emigrants from the former thirteen colonies washed over Nova
Scotia in a massive wave.1 Coming first in great fleets of organized transports
and then in steady streams of constantly shuttling ships, between
April and late November 1783, more than sixteen thousand refugees from
Britain’s failed war landed in her last North American colony. In return for
their allegiance durin...

NINE: The Effects of Exodus: Afro-Maritime Society in Motion

Sometime around 1790—some seven winters after the first black loyalists
arrived in Nova Scotia—a domestic worker along the Bay of Fundy galvanized
the frustrations of settlers like William Fisher and initiated among
local blacks a discussion over whether they might better their conditions
by once again choosing emigration. A remark batted about at a dinner
party, the story...

TEN: Arriving in Sierra Leone: Catastrophe and Its Aftermaths

The prospects of black voyagers bound for Sierra Leone were not so grim
as those faced by captives from Africa destined for Jamaica. But prospects
are only that, and the realities black colonists confronted upon landing
in western Africa were nothing short of calamitous. The Londoners who
disembarked...

Conclusion: Migration and Black Society in the Eighteenth-CenturyBritish Atlantic World

An unceremonious death, this is what awaited so many black migrants,
whether slave or free, on the other sides of their transatlantic journeys.
But while they lived, the ways they moved (out of the Biafran interior, out
of South Carolina, out of Georgia, out of New York, out of London, out
of Halifax), and the consequences of their ocean voyages (some headed
east, some west, others...

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